3 - The Floodgates Open: The Strike at Ford

Summary

A little more than two weeks after James Callaghan announced to the TUC Conference in Brighton that there would be no autumn election, the mounting pressure building up against the 5 per cent wage limit came to a head among workers at Ford Motor Company. On September 22 the first workers at the Halewood plant outside of Liverpool walked out on strike, triggering not only industrial action at other plants in the UK, but also creating an important precedent for other trade unionists. As the eight-week strike wore on and the negotiated rates were increasingly in excess of government policy, the Economist's headline, ‘After Ford, the Deluge?’ became prescient. The dispute at Ford did indeed open the floodgates. Other workers, from lorry drivers to NHS domestic cleaners, were encouraged by Ford workers’ eventual successful claim, which struck at the heart of the government's policy.

While the Winter of Discontent has played a central role in debates surrounding the nature of Britain's economic decline, it is somewhat ironic that the first waves of strikes actually began within the American-owned, Ford Motor Company. Ford workers’ central claim in September 1978 was a wage rise in excess of the government's 5 per cent pay policy; however, the national strike was rooted in both the company's history of industrial relations and Ford workers’ evolving approaches to militancy and politics. While Ford CEOs and managers established new strategies to spur productivity amongst its workforce during the 1960s and 1970s, Ford workers were in the midst of developing their own workplace culture. On the shop floor, new forms of political and industrial militancy began to emerge. These changes were rooted in the evolving face of the workforce at Ford.

In this chapter, I will chart developments within Ford, laying specific emphasis on the shifts occurring amongst the rank and file. I will focus on the social, political, and cultural experiences of four Ford workers to demonstrate the impact these forces had on their actions during the strike of 1978. What will become apparent is that Ford workers were motivated by a complex set of forces rather than simply rash ‘bloody mindedness’ or crass greed. Instead, I will argue that the constellation of political identities that emerged in the Ford strike not only inspired their actions that winter, but also reflected broader social and political changes in Britain in the late 1960s on into the 1970s.